Vacation Logistics - Knittingwise

So we're off tomorrow for our beach vacation. We've rented a cute little cottage in Port St. Joe, FL. I have clothes, toys, metal detector, food, swim stuff. I even picked out a new knitting project, sort of.

I decided to make the 3 hour sweater. Let me make a few comments on this sweater:

1. There's no way in hell, unless you have the title of fastest knitter in the world, that you will be making this sweater in three measly little hours.
2. I looked up this sweater in Ravelry and most people chose to go with needle sizes 8 and 10. So I began this sweater with those needles. Check out the back portion of this sweater with me using those needles:

Hand included for size reference

I realize that this sweater stretches, but come on. I have to stretch it out to it's max to get it to fit across my back. Are the people on Ravelry who are making this size 0?
I can either add four more stitches to each section to get it a tiny bit roomier or go up another needle size, I'm not sure which. Either way the piece in the pic before you will be ripped out.

I'll be out next week, but hopefully will have some fun pics to show you and at least a partial sweater (I hope) when I get back!

The Honest Scrap Award

I got a blog award, Woohoo!

Angie, over at Home Grown, honored me with the Honest Scrap award.



This is how it works:

The Honest Scrap” award is not one to hold all to your self but it must be shared!

First, the recipient has to tell 10 true things about themselves in their blog that no one else knows.

Second, the recipient has to pass along this prestigious award to 10 more bloggers.

Third, Those 10 bloggers all have to be notified they have been given with this award.

Those 10 bloggers that receive this award should link back to the blog that awarded them “The Honest Scrap’ award.

So here goes:

1. I learned how to shear my dogs, one of which could put a sheep to shame with it's fur. Saved $75 on one dog and $45 on another. The shears have already paid for themselves.

2. I am a night owl, not a morning person. My brain doesn't begin fully functioning until around 6pm.

3. I've jumped on the Dave Ramsey debt reduction program. It will be a while 'til we are debt free.

4. I never paint my fingernails, just my toenails. It's too much trouble and I'm too rough on my hands for it to last anyway.

5. I like to blame mistakes on being blonde. It's very convenient.

6. I have aspirations to be an alpaca farmer one day.

7. We originally got the idea to raise alpaca way before I got into spinning and knitting which is kinda funny. We saw them on a late night infomercial and thought they were so cute. It started out as a joke between us and now it's gotten serious. Funny how that kind of thing works huh?

8. We own some rental homes. Our renters think we're rich, boy are they mistaken. We got the rentals when the mortgage companies were practically throwing mortgages at people. All the money has gone right back into the business, we haven't seen a penny yet. We consider it a very long term investment.

9. I dance! Tap, Jazz, Clogging - Just started following Belly Dance lessons off of Youtube, but there's no way I'll let anyone see me doing those lessons (the three year old doesn't count.)

10. Like Angie, I wish I got more comments on the blog, but doesn't everyone who has one? Except maybe the Yarn Harlot. She get's plenty. :) Does anyone ever tag her with these kind of awards?

Whew! Now to honor others with the Honest Scrap Award. Here are ten blogs that I enjoy immensely and I hope you'll enjoy them as well:

Bitten by Knittin'
Knitting on Impulse
Jeanne Knits
Jobo Designs
Knit Witch
Redshirt Knitting
Dabbled
Build/Make/Craft/Bake
Samurai Knitter
Dollar Store Crafts

You may consider yourselves tagged!

Museum Day

Today was fun! Me, my Sis-In-Law and the boys took a trip to the Fernbank Museum in downtown Atlanta today to see the Dinosaur exhibit. The Youngest was particularly impressed. He's in to all things dinosaur or dragon, take your pick. They seem to be interchangeable. According to him they all say "Yaw!"

I got some cute pics: (click to enlarge for extra cuteness)



This one really cracks me up. There was a science room in the museum that had a weather forecasting station. The kids could stand in front of a green screen just like a tv weatherman and see themselves on tv. The problem was, The Youngest was almost too short to be seen:

Look! A half-headed Weatherboy.

The kids are all worn out now. Funny thing is, today is their Dad's Bday. Lucky Dad gets to come home and deal with a three year old that missed his nap today!

Knitting Stuff:

I'm having a bit of a packing dilemma. Well, more knitting than packing really. Do I take the log cabin project since it's incredibly mindless, or do I pick something else that's not quite as mindless. If I picked the other, whatever it may be, will I really be able to concentrate while I'm on vacation? I can't decide. I don't want to take two projects since I won't have room, so I have to choose. :sigh:

Beach Countdown

The Countdown to the "Official Summer Beach Vacation" has begun.

Every single morning I am informed by the Youngest that "we're going to the beach today." Time means nothing to a three year old, he's been told over and over that we leave Saturday.

The boys and I went shopping for supplies today to get a head start on packing. My idea of supplies was sunscreen, bug repellant, nonperishable food items, you get the drift. Gee, I'm so glad that I took my personal beach consultants with me. You wouldn't believe how things have changed over the years. Evidently you now need so many new things for a trip to the beach - waterguns (Ironman and Spiderman of course), pool toys, swords (not sure why we need swords, that one escapes me), legos, movies, etc. Ahem. I might have given in over the water guns, but I spent the rest of the trip to the store saying,

"No."
"No."
"What did I just say? NO!"

Ah, the joys of motherhood and vacation planning. Why can't children see what's really important for a vacation trip? Like: yarn, needles, liquor, (repeat as necessary.)

Tutorial: Make Cloth Napkins from Fat Quarters

I've been working on reducing our budget lately and thought that reusable napkins would be a way to help me do this, not to mention that it is eco-friendly as well. I needed something that would be kid friendly, hide stains well and would be suitable for everyday use.

I found a tutorial online, but the only thing that I took away from it was the word reversible and the measurement 13" x 16". Here are some of the completed napkins. The widest part of each seen below is the front and the small sliver that can be seen next to it is the coordinating back of the napkin:

click to enlarge

I have a ton of fat quarters hidden away under all of our beds that are left over from my quilting days. Many of these are really cute and child friendly, so that's what I decided to use. The problem, is that these are only about 8 or 9 inches wide. Here's my solution/tutorial:

To Make Cloth Napkins from Fat Quarters:
1. Choose two coordinating/contrasting fat quarter fabrics.
2. Cut each of them into two equal pieces.

Cutting!

3. With right sides facing, sew the two pieces together on one side only. Do this again for the coordinating fabric.
( I used a quarter of an inch seam allowance for everything except step number 9.)

It's a quarter inch from the right edge of my presser foot to the needle in the center.

Once done, it should look like this:

Opened and pressed with an iron

4. Cut the fabric into a 13" x 16" piece. Do this for both fabrics. If it's not perfectly square, don't sweat it. It's napkins, not clothing. Close is okay. If it really bugs you, you can use a see through quilter's square and a rotary cutter to get it perfectly squared up.

13" x 16"

Once this is done, iron the seam to one side:

Seam ironed and laying to one side.

5. With right sides facing, sew your two 13" x 16" fabrics together, leaving about two inches on one side open.

Left open to turn the fabric rightside out again.

6. Cut the corners off of the napkin so that when you turn the piece inside out, you don't have a lot of unnecessary bulk in each of the corners.

Clip your corners!

7. Turn the napkin inside out. Make sure to push the corners as far out as you can get them for a nice, crisp corner.

8. Iron your napkin. At the two inch opening, turn both sides in and iron this closed as well.

Ironed and ready for top stitching

9. Top stitch around all four sides of the napkin, including the two inches that were originally left open. I top stitched approximately an eighth of an inch from each edge.

10. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done!

Front and Back of the Cloth Napkin

TIP!

To make turning corners easier, Using the wheel on the right side of your machine (if yours has this), make sure your needle is inserted into the cloth and leave it there for a moment.

Needle Inserted

Then, raise the foot: I picked it up even more to show you that the needle is still inserted into the cloth (please excuse the thumbnail - It's paint, not dirt, I promise!)

Foot lifted

Once this is done, rotate your fabric into the direction that you want to go. Lower your presser foot and you are ready to continue sewing.

Fabric Rotated

Enjoy your new napkins!

Sewing Skirts!

For the past two days I've been bitten by the sewing bug. I don't know why it bit me, but it bit me hard.

It started with the 20 minute skirt tutorial. I loved the fabrics she used. Normally I shy away from elastic waist skirts, but these were too cute to pass up. I took off to the store and found both of these skirts' fabric at Hobby Lobby. They had so much cute fabric, it was difficult to choose just two. When I made my skirts I deviated from the pattern by machine sewing some hems into the skirts. That was the only change that I made to the pattern.

This is the easiest skirt I've ever made. The tutorial is simple, quick and very easy to follow. For the record though, it took me longer than 20 minutes to make the skirts. The first took two hours due to a comedy of errors that are too numerous to mention, but they range from sewing machine problems to stupidity on my part. The second took me about 40 minutes. I figure that if I made another one I'd probably be right on the money at 20 minutes.

Here's how the skirts turned out. I've paired them with a black sleeveless top to show you how it will look on and so that you can't see the ugly elastic waists:





I'll show you the other sewing project tomorrow!

Fishing

We had a milestone in our family over the past weekend: The Youngest caught his first fish!

Granted, it's tiny and you need a magnifying glass to see it in the pic, but it was still a fish. With his PawPaw pretty much controlling the pole, the Youngest got a total of 8 fish on his first outing. The Eldest wracked up a stunning 14 in the same outing. The fishies were mighty hungry for worms that day.


It still thrills me to see the boys out fishing with their PawPaw. What a memory they'll have of him later in life!

The Pain in Frogging

I am still working on the log cabin blanket. As a matter of fact, I might have gone cross-eyed from looking at this damn thing. It's not really the blanket's fault, it's not the miles and miles and miles of boring garter stitch either. I'm putting all the blame on the yarn.

The Debbie Mumm Traditions yarn is a deliciously soft and gloriously colored corespun yarn. It's 70% acrylic and 30% wool. There. Now I've told you the good stuff, now for the bad. It's a corespun yarn. It's 70% acrylic and 30% wool. There, that was also the bad stuff.

It's splitty as hell and bunches up viciously. That's not so bad while you're knitting it up if you hold it loosely. The problem comes when, not if, you need to frog it. The soft yarn grips to itself like there's no tomorrow.

Remember these? These were a tank that for some God forsaken reason I thought this yarn would be good for:


I am in the process of frogging them. The bottom one took me four hours to frog. Yes, that's right, four friggin' hours of fighting with grabby yarn mixed with short rows. It wasn't fun. Needful, but not fun.

So after the frogging I have a bazillion small balls of yarn. Look how many ends have to be woven when you use a lot of these small balls of yarn in just a couple of squares:


Yeah. More not fun.

But, look how beautiful these are from the front:


I don't know how much more yarn I'll need and have no clue how much I'll get from frogging the other piece. I may need to try and order more since my JoAnn's didn't have any of this color left. They had two other colorways that could be fun to mix with this one, but I'm not sure if I'll do that or not.

All I know is that I just have to make triple sure any of the squares don't need frogging again, cause if it comes to that, I'll be putting the whole kit and caboodle in the trash.

Panic at the Escalator

Obviously the summer months are not the optimum time for me to be blogging. I do apologize for going incommunicado for a whole week, but I am back now. There were many things that happened last week, such as a lake trip, trying not to kill my children now that they are not in school and are at each other's throats, etc.

But there was one especially amusing incident last week that I want to share with you. It started out innocently enough as a trip to Dick's Sporting Goods. My father and husband have birthdays a week apart, so the kids and I hopped into the Mom van and went shopping for campy kind of stuff.

We grabbed a firestarter for my Dad and then found a cool tent thing that we could use on our family beach vacation trip in two weeks. It's not a camping tent, more like a tailgating tent that pops up in one fell swoop. Perfect, but it weighed a ton. But that was cool too since it has rollers on it and could easily be drug wherever you need it.

Great. Now, I got everybody sorted out: Eldest in front with the little items, me in the middle dragging the tent that ways a ton and the Youngest was bringing up the rear. We headed down the escalator (can you see where this is going yet?) in the same order: Eldest first with small items, me dragging tent that weighs a ton, and the Youn- oh wait a minute - guess what? He panicked at the last minute (the child that is afraid of nothing) and pulled away from me and stayed at the top of the damn escalator!

I threw the tent that weighs a ton to the eighty pound weakling and said, "Here, you're on your own" and turned around. My brain took one hundredth of a second to gauge how fast the escalator was moving and tried to figure out how fast my legs were going to have to move so that I would not be jogging in place. I was now about 8 or 9 steps down and I took off, blazing fast, looking hopelessly hokey as I started hoofing it up the moving steps. Meanwhile, the Youngest was at the top screaming "Mommy! Mommy!" and at this time four really cute college age guys show up behind him, grinning from ear to ear. Jeez, wouldn't you just know it?

I got to the top step, grabbed a little arm and dragged him to the stairs and proceeded to rendezvous with the Eldest at the bottom who had somehow managed to grab the one ton tent and drag it to safety. Phew! What a workout. I wasn't even huffing and puffing at the end either, with much thanks to Ye Olde Adrenaline.

What a hoot. I laughed so hard I could hardly breathe. Oh, and yeah, the cute college guys did too. I'm sure they were laughing with me and not at me. Yeah, right.

I was out and about today and came across the latest issue of Simply Knitting. I absolutely adore this magazine. It's a Brit magazine, so it's not cheap here since it's an import, but worth it just for the Alan Dart Toy patterns alone. This month they have Medieval Mice! I seriously want to make a medieval mouse now.


They also included a purse pattern that can be done four different ways and the handles to make one. This is on my to do list for sure.

The squares are coming along. I thought I would get completely finished with the fourth square last night, but it wasn't meant to be. It didn't get done today either since my Mom and I went thrift store hopping - got a load of books too, but they were mostly children's books.


I did go looking for more yarn and tried to scout out a good black yarn to have running in between the squares and for the border, but I'm going to have to take a square in with me to find a black yarn that matches the texture of the Debbie Mumm yarn. The yarn that I'm working with is a wool/acrylic blend and it would be nice to find that kind of blend, but if not I'll probably go with acrylic. Of course they were out of the colorway that I'm using here.

Anyway, I'm heading off to choir in a bit and need to find something to feed the hungry menfolk now - see ya tomorrow!

Is It Wrong...

Perhaps it would be wrong to laugh at a kid while he's throwing a tantrum to watch a movie. But when the movie is Peter Pan and he's screaming "I Wanna Watch Pizza Pan!" ?

Lemme tell ya, It's hard to keep a straight face when that happens.

I'll have some knitting stuff for ya tomorrow, I hope.